


Drink and Be Merry

by cordialcount



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, Possibly Horror, Possibly Magical, Possibly Nothing At All
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13140291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: The girls of Ohtori have been feeling a bit peckish. Juri, to her dismay, is no exception.





	Drink and Be Merry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/gifts).



Tuesday began with a bowl exploding. Anthy had picked up such disgraceful habits—where had these culinary frissons been last year, when Juri's classes were the optimal rumor-gathering distance away? 

A gob of liver was clinging to her face instead of her left eyebrow. _My livelihood_ , Juri thought, feeling the perforated remains of her composure and hairdo. _Not all of us can eat off the chairman's charity..._ She rounded on Anthy.

A wrist flew past. Anthy had bowed low enough, mid apology to Nanami, that her hair overhung her glasses, and so Nanami hit her only glancingly on the head. "You ingratiate, I allowed you back because anyone can make sashimi! Your monkey," which scampered off before Nanami could grab its tail, one slice spread like a cape across its back, "can do it!"

Juri hastily crossed her arms. Between the ear-piercing complaints and the tear in Nanami's shirt, exposing a purple camisole that clashed unavoidably with the banana blouse atop it, she doubted anyone had noticed her raised hand.

"Doesn't tell you if Himemiya can," Kozue said. "Even if she can burn the table with a knife."

"I'm sorry, I really have no talent for cooking. Please forgive me again, Nanami-san."

A scrap of shrapneled food slid into Juri's mouth. She bit down. The elephant stories came to mind; if Nanami was going to paint herself a target, Juri was not going to interfere. What business of hers was it what inane things the Bride did, so long as Juri never sat by her again at dinner?

 

* * *

 

The next day a girl swooned on the bridge as Juri passed by. Juri, definitely the closest council member given the girl's head lay across her feet, dutifully checked her pulse: warm, if jumpy. Behind her she heard Utena; it was very hard not to hear Utena. Knowing that the victim was likely to be carried bridal-style into class, panting her gratefulness into Utena's pink ears, Juri left her to it.

Anthy smiled from the field beyond the bridge. Utena-sama, so noble, no doubt.

On Thursday she came out of physics to find three girls outside. "Senpai, you're always dressed so tastefully," said one. "Would you like to go on a date?"

"You want me to go on a date with you?" Juri repeated incredulously. Ever since Utena had arrived in Ohtori, Juri had become unaccustomed to receiving blatant requests from strangers.

"I told you to be more direct!" said another. She flung herself at Juri.

In a duel she would have had no chance of connecting. As it was, Juri had zero expectations of having a neck pressed to her mouth anytime soon—never mind her hopes—and for a second the girl managed to push her collarbone against Juri's startled tongue. Juri, feared for her aplomb, almost bit her. Then the girl sighed like a kitten. She sagged into Juri's arms. Juri set her on the ground and nudged her away with a toe.

"Next," Juri said, sarcasm at its limit. They scattered.

 

* * *

 

On Friday Anthy, about to exit the locker room ahead of Juri, stopped at the door. "Oh my," she murmured.

"What is it?" Juri said.

"It's so lovely," Anthy said. "Juri-san has so many admirers." She ducked behind Juri. Her dress that day seemed to be sticking to her thighs; perhaps she had left her ridiculous collection of petticoats inside.

Unbelievably, the girls were multiplying. At least a dozen faces pivoted to Juri at once.

One stepped forward. She was lanky and indelicate, even perched on the balls of her feet. A bird's nest of braids was lashed to her head, and her nose and hands and apparent likelihood of being a safe bet in battle royale were not at all like Shiori's. Juri's shoulders rolled, unconsciously, for height. But the girl had wound a red scarf around her throat, and it gave her something: the air of something fragile that could be yielded, something Juri could know she was good enough not to take.

"Arisugawa-san," she said, "I'm interested in the fencing club. I took some lessons, but you're so beautiful with a foil, i don't know if I would qualify. Do you have any time today to take me aside and... evaluate me?"

Juri glanced at her face, rosy and infatuated. "No," Juri said. Her control was fraying. The gym teacher could write her a note if he dared. "You can ask the vice captain."

But all evening she couldn't stop remembering it: the flush that had blossomed on her face, like blood in water.

 

* * *

 

"The Chairman even complimented me on it," Shiori was saying. "Me, the best history scores in our year! It's nothing to your whole shelf of awards, but I was so happy I could die."

Juri had achieved a full minute's conversation with Shiori. Juri swallowed both a wish to congratulate herself and a swelling dread. Shiori could distill time into poison: in retrospect, even the comparatively placid afternoons of Juri's childhood had fertilized her well. Juri, sleeve to sleeve with the girl she loved, tried to imagine her a thoughtless child and failed. From the start Shiori had always been fashioning a past lit with nostalgia. Juri's thumb crept anyway over her knuckle. "You should be more confident. Believe and they will know your—talents," she finished, quieter. She couldn't bring herself to say brilliance.

"What were you saying? Never mind. Some of my classmates wanted to talk to you," Shiori said, dragging them around a corner. "Do me a favor, senpai?"

The handhold was businesslike before Shiori let go. They were instantly hemmed in by skirts. Shiori swept her hand out, look, as if over a fairy ring. Not inapt. For all Juri knew, these girls with their uniformly wet-limned lashes had sprouted from the same great heart in the Ohtori ground. "We're sorry to interrupt your very busy day, Arisugawa-san, but we admire you so much, we were wondering if you would..."

The Chairman could summon with a flick of his glance. Juri could dismiss with the same motion—but she couldn't do it. She could feel the girls like a pulse. How they dimpled and fluttered, each with their own hugeness of eye, but their invitations to coffee or track meets or clarinet all voiced the same hunger—in the open—like they presumed their hunger was shared— 

She whirled around and walked away.

They all followed.

They weren't mushrooms or zombies, or anything like that. They chatted to each other. They scuffed their shoes on different cobblestones. Any one of them would have received no notice in the regular population of Ohtori, and yet in force they made Juri's heart pound like it could escape. 

Juri never ran from anyone. She walked faster, past Nanami shouting that she too was accepting minions, until a building she'd never entered before was in sight. Then she wrenched open the first door around another corner and wedged herself through.

She had to crouch. She had to wait, dizzy and very hungry indeed, for all those near bodies to pass her by. Her height was superb for modeling, but it was of no good in the supply closet, where the hangers clanging overhead—or at-head—could only be muffled by her curls. Thankfully it hadn't been a year for boyish cuts.

Eventually the crowd seemed to be gone. She was about to leave, perhaps claim she had the flu until whatever rumors were fueling Ohtori to such lengths faded away, when the back of the closet dropped out. Off balance, Juri tumbled out too under the glare of Kiryuu Nanami.

"Himemiya thought the medical supplies were behind this door," Nanami said. "She's so clueless sometimes! Unless you're a doctor too?"

If only Juri could fix her own heart. She had no idea what extremity could make the entire freshman class chase her so, but she wanted to be rid of it too. "Apply ice and lie down, Nanami. Where was Anthy?"

"Were you looking for me?" 

She had been just behind Nanami. Having forgone her usual uniform for a— _nightgown_ seemed most accurate—she'd blended into the wallpaper, her outfit from collar to knee the shade of a bruise. Juri had never been in the room, which in its warren of cabinets and knickknacks reminded her of a painting. It had such highs and lows of light and dark.

"You'd think a student who gets held back every year could handle basic navigation of the school," Nanami said, shaking her head, and stomped off.

"It's a pleasure to see you, Juri-san."

"What do you want," Juri said. She meant it to be curt, but on _want_ her breath deserted her. She hated the intimacy of the word suppressed; she shuddered with anger, or thirst, and in Anthy's fleetingly parted mouth she saw surprise, or perhaps sadness. Were they even possible in a face so regularly molded into a vacant simper and topped with those shining glasses like an anglerfish? The light dipped. The mouth turned up.

"Ah," said Anthy, "I'm touched you asked. I'm worried, Juri-san, you look a little under the weather. May I please take a look?"

Juri had always had the discomfiting sense Anthy did not need to look at anyone to understand who they were. In the first days they had been engaged, the year before, Juri had blocked the slit under her bedroom door with a towel; by the last days she'd banned her Bride from her dorm building, and slept in truth in the second house of an employer. But Anthy had also been good with Juri's occasional injuries—back strains, dancer's heel, cuts and scrapes. Juri was exhausted. She let herself into a chair next to Anthy. "The nurse wouldn't understand if I told her girls following me around is a problem."

"And is that the problem?"

Juri shrugged. She yawned. "Romantic attentions are just a fad," she said. "Wasn't Wakaba climbing all over Utena for a while? And now she's just making her lunch."

"Oh!" Anthy said. "Look, Juri, your teeth have really grown." She took a mirror and a thimble from her pocket, and slanted the mirror into the sun. "Should I file them down for you?"

It was a very small mirror. She had to step closer to Juri for her to use it; her arm was almost wrapped around Juri's shoulders by the time Juri's incisors were indeed long and gleaming in view. In her mouth they felt like knives. Anthy's throat was in the mirror, so close, like a miracle she couldn't reach. Or if she leaned forward she could, and did, and nearly toppled herself at the hot rush through to her stomach when Anthy's skin brushed her lips.

Once Juri had glimpsed something in the elevator—it couldn't have been what she thought, but it had looked like the Rose Bride stepping vertically out of her dress, into thin air. The dress had collapsed without the girl. Now in their shared reflection the girl was collapsing out of the dress, with the same unshakable feeling of slow-suspended demolition.

Anthy was bare to the waist. Atop her breasts Juri found the marks of prior teeth: not recent, they were so keenly and deeply made they could have been, like rings, a shameless form of identification. 

Juri reared back. Before her head hit ground she could feel her mouth hooking open, in horror or in imitation. She struck the flooring, hard, with a sound she had a conscious half-second to think was terrifying but that she would survive, and with echoes nothing like any of her experience: a clang, another clang, clang, clang, each nothing like the other, and a quivering thud like they'd been stopped by one small body which any moment might give.

 

* * *

 

Juri woke light-headed. A good meal would fix it, she thought. 

Her refrigerator was empty. Perhaps her room had been cleaned out over the weekend. She rarely bothered to read the janitorial notices. She crept her way out of her dormitory, grimacing at the midday light and preemptively bracing her fingertips along the walls.

Shiori was leaning on the outside door. Through its strip of glass Juri could just make out the back of an empire waist, absurdly narrow under a dark bobbed head: perhaps a minute's distance at a sedate walk. Shiori cleared her throat.

"A friend told me you were sick, Juri-san," she said. "I was concerned that I made it worse for you last week, with all the excitement. So I wanted to apologize. I hope it hasn't been too stressful for you."

What stress—a crick in her spine while she slept? Was Shiori smiling? Juri couldn't stand to know. "I appreciate it, I accept," Juri said, though her tone came closer to sleet than ice. "You shouldn't miss any more class."

For lack of any direction safe to look at, she chose down. The tilt of Shiori's hip had propped one leg over the other. Shiori was tugging an errant stocking back up past her knees. The shifting silk brought her flesh into relief, sunken behind the bone cap as though squeezed into place by a fencer's thumb. When her leg straightened the movement carried Juri's gaze all the way up, to Shiori lifting her head, the muscles of her neck in stark column. Shiori had never been ravishingly pretty; this made no difference to the depth of feeling that burst into Juri's head when she saw Shiori smiling, with so many teeth visible it might have been genuine. Really, speaking of teeth—there was so much more of Juri to file down.

"Well, if you're going to sulk like that, I won't ask you to lunch," said Shiori. "I just wanted to see how you were doing. I guess I have, and you're as cheery as ever."

What are you testing for, Juri wanted to say, you knew I wasn't good enough for you when we were ten years old. She thought, you're asking me to lunch? Her wrist buckled at the wall, and the words caught behind her teeth: the ache welling back into her, to water some strange tooth or thorn between her ribs.


End file.
